Posted
by
samzenpuson Sunday August 22, 2010 @02:53PM
from the clean-up-or-pay-up dept.

Starting next year Cleveland residents face paying a $100 fine if they don't recycle, and the city's new high-tech trash cans will keep track if they don't. The new cans are embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes which keep track of how often residents take them to the curb. If the chip shows you haven't brought your recycle can out in a while, a lucky trash supervisor will go through your can looking for recyclables. From the article: "Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens. Recyclables include glass, metal cans, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard."

In brief: Most of the items we separate don't get recycled because nobody buys the trash (i.e. there's no market for used paper or used milk jugs). Precious metal like aluminum and copper is the only thing they succeed in selling. But the rest? The city then has no choice but to dump the goods in the landfill anyway.

They may get contracts, but recycling is largely a huge failure as many cities/companies end up land-filling the recyclables along with the trash.

There is no real market for most this stuff except cardboard and metals. (Its already in the form it will be recycled into).

If recycling pays, as the slogan claims, you would expect some trickle back to the consumer. You would expect some waste-bill reduction. Instead we see punitive measures designed to enforce feel good regulations.

It doesn't pay, its almost always tax payer funded, and the separation process could be automated at dump sites for less money than duplicate pickup runs and enforcement actions.

There is no real market for most this stuff except cardboard and metals. (Its already in the form it will be recycled into).

Not true. Glass is generally profitable to recycle, and is in significant demand.

Similarly, PETE (#1) plastic and HDPE (#2) plastic are also generally worth recycling. In some cases, #5, too. Most of the other stuff... not so much.

Either way, though, even if the city just dumps it in a landfill, that's still better than you dumping it in a landfill. When they dump it in a landfill, they're creating a huge pile of segregated plastic. If we get to the point that we're short on petroleum and it makes sense to find every shred of plastic we can for recycling, those piles will be a gold mine. Your random bottle in the middle of your trash will still be worthless.

I'm sure the recycling companies make money, but that's easy if you push costs off on someone else.

What business wouldn't be more profitable if it could "push costs off on someone else"? But I'd also like an example of a cost that a recycling company externalizes. Unless they have no competition, they'd have to pay the municipality the market rate for the recyclables. Perhaps some materials cost more to recycle than they are worth as an end product, but again you can't charge more than the market rate for that service. Is the "free market" busted in this case? Are barriers to entry for recyclers too

But I'd also like an example of a cost that a recycling company externalizes.

Good point; Recycling companies tend to benefit more from price support and fixing. My first idea would be a sort of fraud - recycling something like electronics by shipping them over to those incredibly environmentally unsound recycling facilities over in China.

Perhaps some materials cost more to recycle than they are worth as an end product, but again you can't charge more than the market rate for that service.

Most recycling companies, as opposed to scrap metal companies, don't generally operate in a competitive market; they pretty much all enjoy a degree of monopoly.

Are barriers to entry for recyclers too high? Is there a cartel or price fixing going on?

Barriers to entry - generally yes, in that the technology simply isn't there to justify

I mostly agree, but as far as cans go, they don't have to be very clean to go into the smelter. Smelting can deal with excess carbon, perhaps with excess nitrogen too. That's what's mostly in organic matter, right?

From a social standpoint, why bother? The homeless are better recyclers than the average person. The cans in the allies around here are picked clean each and every night. Though, I generally just put all the good stuff (cans, bottles) in a separate bag and leave it on the curb. It is usually gone before nightfall.

People have always killed each other and needed to defend themselves. If you ban firearms, they'll use knives, if you ban knives, they'll use blunt objects, if you ban blunt objects, they'll use their fists.

Don't believe me? Look at the UK - they banned guns and then the crimes committed using knives skyrocketed.

Homicide rate has nothing to do with guns. Now, if you had numbers for what percent of homicides involved guns, then you might have something close to a point.

It's been long known that Americans are much more likely to fight than people in Canada and the UK who resemble cows in their lethargic complacency.

Also, if you were from the US, you'd know that most people DON'T "carry" a gun. Very few states have laws where you're allowed to actually have a gun on you. Amusingly, it's the states where you're NOT

The Japanese outlawed carrying swords during the Meiji Restoration (1860s).

The police still had swords. So did the military. The commoners no longer had swords. Which sucked for them, since the yakuza and other criminals simply started carrying concealable knives, or else started carrying around shit like this [antiques-bible.com].

"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Insert the name of your favorite weapon in place of "guns" and it's still the same.

If you outlawed coffee tables, then people who own coffee tables are criminals by definition.

The difference is that a gun - or a sword, or a knife, or any other weapon - is designed to change the balance of power in a fight.

If you outlaw guns (or swords, or knives), then the vast majority of the population becomes UNARMED. This makes it that much easier for an armed criminal - already a scofflaw - to commit crimes. The statistics bear it out; in Britain, police outlawed guns, and outlawed any knife which could possibly be drawable and usable in a fight. The result? Massively increased knife crime. Their low numbers of gun crime are related to a general disdain for guns societally (hunting with guns having been an "elite" occupation), but gun crime is now on the rise there despite the incredibly restrictive laws.

Washington, DC outlawed guns, and during the period when they were outlawed, they spent several years as the gun-crime capital of the US.

Perhaps we should rephrase it for people like you. Does "If you outlaw weapons, you disarm the populace while doing precisely Jack Crap to prevent criminals who don't give a shit about the law from getting weapons" work better for you?

Yes, and the people running the disposal service have rights too, including the right to run their service they way they wish.

It's funny how the people who claim oppression are always so willing to tread on the rights of others. "Everyone has to give me what I want, how I want, when I want, for the price I want, because I have rights!"

It's possible new businesses have developed since 6 years ago, when P&T filmed that episode. At the time it was cheaper to grow new trees and make paper, than to deal with the expense of cleaning used paper and disposing of expensive, environmentally-hazardous chemicals. Maybe the equation has changed now?

Still I think it's worthwhile to watch the episode. Questioning your assumptions is a good thing. (ex: Most people assume Betamax di

So we are forced to GIVE you our property so that you can sell it for profit? Why aren't you paying us?

That doesn't follow at all.

I don't agree with Cleveland's approach, but your statement is silly and ignores the facts.

If you wish to get paid for your recyclable trash, take it to a recycler yourself. No one will find any recyclables in your trash if you've taken them away yourself and sold the aluminum, paper and whatever else of value you can. There is no implication in TFA that residents are forced to give their recyclables to the city, just that they put them in the recycle bins not the trash if they

That show (in general, and that episode in particular) are about as much proof of that assertion as something your cousin's friend's older brother said. Penn and Teller don't give you evidence, they insult things instead. (Check out their argument about subsidies. There are many pros and cons to be stated for such things, but they don't really do either. They give Teller a gun to rob Penn and then throw the cash around. Logic in action, Bullshit style!)

Seriously, I wanted to like this show, but it's total crap. It's entertainment rather than education. It's bullshit itself.

It is certainly a "feel good" action. Doing the right thing is sometimes inconvenient or expensive, therefore something inconvenient or expensive must be the right thing to do. Exactly the same mindset as security theater.

However... One thing recyclables have going for them is they're typically pretty non-toxic, etc. SO IN THEORY a waste disposal company could save money by throwing out really nasty semi-toxic "expensive" garbage in an expensive landfill, like used diapers, food waste, etc. Then relativ

Myth: Someone goes through the trash and pulls out the recyclables before it goes to the landfill.
Anything thrown into the trash will end up in the landfill. The labor required to sort through trash after it has already been mixed is prohibitive and almost never happens.

...and yet here we have a story about them doing just that and more.. Fining you if you don't do it.

You've missed the point entirely. The quoted myth is arguing that most or all trash gets sorted anyway. This is not remotely true. The Cleveland authorities look through some people's trash to see whether it contains recyclable materials, not to actually perform the separation for them.

Excuse: Recycling is a burden on families.
Recycling is so popular because the American public wants to do it.

If it were popular the article wouldn't be about people being fined for not doing it.

Another non sequitur. If 40% of the population is doing something, I'd say it's pretty popular, wouldn't you? But that's not even a majority.

Ticket for not taking out trash, ticket for taking out trash too early, ticket for not taking containers in early enough, ticket for too much weight in trash. Is this really helping out the environment or just a hidden way to increase taxes?
I do note that their metric of success is how many tickets they issue.

Have you ever visited a place that has poor/no trash pickup or where people leave their trash out all the time? It's not an environmental thing, it's an aesthetic and sanitary issue. Garbage attracts animals and disease. Trash piling up on the streets is ugly.

Also, as the article states, "Cleveland pays $30 a ton to dump garbage in landfills, but earns $26 a ton for recyclables." Garbage removal is a shared resource, so the costs should be spread fairly. I guess the fairest thing would be to weigh everyone's garbage, but I doubt anyone would be a fan of that.

All fine and good unless you live in a place similar to mine. Incinerating your own trash is illegal. Oh yes, and to make sure you're not tempted to do so, the convenience of weekly trash pickup is mandatory. And the sole company that services my area seems to change every couple of years.

I have to throw trash down the chute into a central container for my entire apt complex and I know a lot of places here have that mechanism. How are they going to figure out then whose trash is it?
Also, what if you take your trash out yourself and not use trash services. I know a lot of people who do that - saves 20$ a month.

I'm wondering how long it will be until my recyclables are considered public property even if I don't put them in the recycling bin.

"I'm sorry sir, it is now illegal to sell your aluminum cans yourself, you must by law dispose of them in the bin to subsidize the cost of disposing of the non-recyclables, and the part of the "recyclable" stuff that we lose money on."

It isn't so you "have to purchase city water", it has to do with how water rights work. Because Colorado supplies water to something like 18 states, often the water that fills our rivers is already owned by someone who lives in Kansas, Arizona, or wherever. Water rights are based on age, the oldest rights are the best rights. When someone with water rights needs water, they make a call for that water and it gets released from a reservoir. If people collect their own rainwater, they are reducing the supply available to those who already own water rights.

I don't necessarily agree with this concept, but that's how it works. Out of all the things I would do if I could travel back in time, the first thing I would do is buy as many water rights in Colorado as I possibly could.

I don't know if I would call it "pretty messed up", Colorado's water laws are the way they are for a reason. This system has been in place since the 1800's and in pretty unlikely to change. And other than flash floods in the mountains, we don't often see flood stage water levels.

Though, if we receive a much higher than normal snowfall over the winter, and unseasonably warm weather very early, we could run into some flood danger when "mud season" begins (that's what we call th

Recycling, in limited forms, is reasonable. But for the most part it is a PR game and has no real impact on anything.

Post-consumer materials, like plastic, is almost never recycled because of the contamination issues. A water bottle can be recycled but if one neck ring from a cap gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. As of yet, this level of sorting and handling removing neck rings and caps can only be done by hand - at union wages for the most part. This eliminates any reason for recycling water bottles or milk containers - it costs maybe 100x what the recycled materials would be worth to sort them to that level.

Paper is one of those iffy items. If you have a source of clean paper and can sort out coated papers from uncoated (magazines from newspapers, for example) recycling it makes sense and the pulp from processing uncoated paper can be used in a large variety of materials. Unfortunately, getting coated paper into the mix changes things enough that it can only be used in a few applications. So we are back to a very complicated sorting scheme if it is post-consumer. Another problem with post-consumer is "dirty" paper. Food waste mixed in or other contaminates again seriously limits the utility of recycled materials, so much so that it is almost always just dumped.

So anyone talking about post-consumer paper recycing is almost always dealing with clean products like newspapers that can be sorted or office materials that often do not need to be. They aren't talking about taking a mix of papers from curbside recycling efforts because the costs to process that are large and the markets for the output very restricted.

Metals, especially aluminum, have been profitable for quite a while. So much so that there are machines that can sort out the metal containers - by type - quickly. Glass containers can be cleaned and sorted but the value is far less there because of different types of glass being mixed in and the general impracticality of sorting it.

So what happens to curbside recycling materials? I seriously doubt anyone is hand-sorting and dealing with contamination issues like neck rings. A sorting machine to pick out the metal bits is easy and should be a part of any recycling effort. Glass is probably a big question mark. Paper? Almost certainly it is dumped.

When people had to sort their own stuff it gave the impression of it being more valuable, but the contamination issues were still there preventing most of the stuff from being used.

While Penn and Teller's presentation on this may be a bit dated, from everything I see they are still mostly right. It is a feel-good program for both people recycling and for municipalities. The limited amount of materials that are recovered from the recycling stream do earn enough to make it almost - but not quite - worth doing. But the PR value is priceless.

I've heard comments like this before (including from representatives of cities where recycling is required). Why are materials other than paper not handled along these lines:

- Shred/chop/smash the material.- Run the small pieces through a rinse to take care of e.g. unrinsed bottles.- Vibrate or centrifuge the material so the it's sorted by mass.- Skim off the different types of plastic (or metal, etc.) in layers.

? I'm no expert, but I would think that sorting by mass would be a pretty accurate way of separating the types of raw material. Isn't that more or less how junkyards handle metal recycling of old cars?

That sounds like a very sane idea. The layers will be imperfect, and some materials with have similar densities, so will end up mixed in a single layer.

There is a relatively easy solution for that though, namely heat the resulting mixture up slowly. At various points the different components will melt, and can be drained out, and end up in different containers based on the type.

The biggest problem with such a system though is that all glass colors will get mixed, so you will end up with odd color glass, which could really only be made into brown glass. A similar issue would occur with colored plastics.

This sounds great, and I'm sure Penn and Teller are very smart, but if it costing Cleveland less to recycle than it is for them to dispose of the trash, then isn't that the market working perfectly? So what if 90% of the stuff that gets put in a single-stream recycling bin still ends up in a landfill? That's still 10% less than was going in before, and the city could make money off of it.Libertarians and conservatives love to carp about government waste, but then you have a clear example like this where the government has a plan in place to reduce waste and suddenly it's Orwellian.

No, I completely understand that your armchair analysis based on a blurb on a tech site is going to trump the city's analysis in all cases.

With a metric of success based on number of $100 tickets issued, I think we can safely say that they don't expect increased compliance to pay
for this. And at $26 per ton, it would take a lot of increased compliance to equal a single ticket.

They may, however, need to deal with "accidental" success, as has happened with other "punitive" taxes such as on smoking or g

It's actually about half that. Because that garbage is no longer going to be dumped at a cost of $30 per ton, they're saving themselves that $30 in addition to making $26. So eight years to pay for itself, but your comments on the longevity of the bins still stands.

According to engadget [engadget.com] it's going to cost 2.5 million. At $26 per ton that's 96,153 tons of recyclables before the new bins are paid off.

According to the article they picked up 5,800 tons of recyclables last year. Assuming that's the average for the recycling to pay off the new bins it's going to take 16 years.

Actually, your numbers are off. The city gets paid $26/ton for recyclables, but if those same recyclables go to the landfill, it costs $30/ton. So the city nets $56/ton from recyclables.

Also, I live in Cleveland. The recycling rate here is really pitiful. I think it is around 3% last I heard. Most of the city doesn't have curbside recycling pickup (aside from a few pilot areas). You have to haul your recyclables to a drop off. If this system gives us curbside pickup and some enforcement, it is easy to

I'm old enough to remember when people didn't litter like they do today...when graffiti was rare-to-unknown...when people took their trash out and brought in the empty barrels and containers promptly. When oversight is not required because people behave responsibly, there is no demand - no motivation - for more government oversight.

We're trapped in a vicious circle, actually...the nation's leaders set horrible examples with their personal greed and self-centered behavior, the people follow their lead, to which the nation's leaders respond with laws designed to rectify everybody else's behavior. Heaven forbid that they just behave ethically and morally themselves and refuse to tolerate anything but the same from their peers.

I'm old enough to remember when people didn't litter like they do today...when graffiti was rare-to-unknown...when people took their trash out and brought in the empty barrels and containers promptly.

Puh-lese. Littering is MUCH less prevalent than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Remember the PSA they used to run on TV with the crying Indian? I do, and I remember how much worse the litter used to be back in those days.

Don't get me wrong. There are still an awful lot of slobs out there who litter. But from what I see in the areas I travel the problem is better than in the "good old days."

In the little town where I live, we pay $2 per bag of garbage picked up at the curb (kerb). Recycle is collected free. The more aggressively I recycle, the less I pay in "bag tags" to the slimy city council, who spend it on new pickup trucks for their greasy-haired hillbilly workers to drive around in all day just doing nothing at all... oh, was I going on a bit? Anyway, we compost for the same reason -- it costs us less in garbage fees and also garners some nice greenie points and a pat on the back.
Beer, liquor and wine containers all have refundable deposits where I live, so they don't go into the recycle anyway.
If we could reduce the amount of bloody tim-horton cups littering the streets of Ontario, it would be a better place to live.

Why is it we insist upon such complicated schemes for getting people to recycle? A good old fashion deposit scheme seems a much more effective alternative, although it does require something be done at the state or federal level, and a whole lot less intrusive. It works like this...

Require any store that sell beverage containers to accept them in return for cash or credit.Require any large store that sells them provide automated reverse vending machines (Tomra) at the front of the store and they must pay out cash.Barcodes must be attached to the product and intact for there to be a refund.Raise the deposit on various items until you meet specific recycling rate targets.Make defrauding the machine a felony.

This is hardly an original idea, but it works. You can easily achieve 80+% recycling rates for bottles and cans.

Downside - the usual bitching from the usual people that either hate the idea that they might be helping out their fellow man or vested interests like bottlers that think it will impact sales.

Require any store that sell beverage containers to accept them in return for cash or credit.
Require any large store that sells them provide automated reverse vending machines (Tomra) at the front of the store and they must pay out cash.
Barcodes must be attached to the product and intact for there to be a refund.
Raise the deposit on various items until you meet specific recycling rate targets.
Make defrauding the machine a felony.

California has a scheme much like this. Interestingly, there's a push on to raise the deposits, not because people aren't redeeming the items for the deposit, but because they are. Like any good kleptocracy, California spends whatever funds aren't nailed down (and some that are), and unredeemed deposits have been a cash cow for them. With the economic downturn the redemption rate went way up, so poof, there went all that unclaimed money. They want to jack the deposits higher so that the amount they used to get is restored. Of course, that'll encourage even greater redemptions so they'll have to raise it again...

Just please don't follow the CA scheme. In NY, where I lived before Los Angeles, every grocery store had a few machines and you could bring down the bag of bottles you had whenever you wanted to. There was never a line, and everything just worked.

In CA, it's horrible. First, a lot more stuff has deposits on it. Second, most stores don't have any machines - they're only at special stores that have a separate booth on their property that handles recyclables (and not the ones I shop at for the most part). Ther

Require any store that sell beverage containers to accept them in return for cash or credit.

Most bottles in Germany are glass. Either way. Because of a 25 euro cent "pfand", most bottles get recycled. This pfand is charged on purchase and returned when you bring the empty bottles back in. Unlike the 5 cent "deposit" here, any store that sell the bottles must take them back and participate in the system, so there are no recycling centers to look for and drive to on the customer's end. Bottles are usually so

Downside - the usual bitching from the usual people that either hate the idea that they might be helping out their fellow man or vested interests like bottlers that think it will impact sales.

Why do you think recycling helps your fellow man? Let's look at it. Current schemes require people to sort their trash. That's using up everyone's time at home and at work. If you use up five minutes per person per week, that's still two full working weeks (83 hours of time per week) per thousand people. Further, recycling is generally a costly process with little benefit. Recycling aluminum cans are a clear profit, it takes a lot less energy to recycle an aluminum can than to make one from ore. Glass has s

We've got a deposit scheme here (Netherlands) and it works a treat. Doesn't take much effort, and you further reduce the amount of land lost to land fills. What's not to love about it?

This is typical environmentalist religion. Everyone has to make a sacrifice, which "doesn't take much effort" according to its adherents, and in return you get some feelgood (less "land lost to landfills"). Here's how I see it. You are wasting the time of millions of people. Sure it's only a few minutes per week per per person, but it adds up. My take is that proper recycling is probably around five minutes a week per person. For a thousand people, that's 83 hours of labor per week, about two full time jobs in the States, except nobody is getting paid.

Further, most of these items weren't worth recycling in the first place, or they'd be recycled anyway. Keep in mind that unlike trash disposal, you need a lot of people to handle recycled materials. There's more waste streams to keep track of and someone has to sort the trash. Down the road, I imagine everything will get automated (including tough tasks like sorting milk jugs from PET soda containers), but when that happens, you won't need to sort the trash at all. And for many items, you don't gain any energy advantage from recycling.

For example, recycling newspaper or plastics still looks to be a net loss (especially if everything gets mixed too much).

Further, even if you don't have landfill space locally (almost never a problem in the US, but might be a legitimate problem in the Netherlands, due to notorious high land costs), you can always ship your trash (via rail or ship, which is pretty cheap) somewhere else that does have the space (say Eastern Europe or Northern Africa, for example). Now for some reason, people don't like "exporting the pollution", but it is a legitimate solution that can waste less of our collective resources than a recycling program does and can be environmentally sound as well (especially if you move the "pollution" to a place where it has less environmental impact).

Now let me explain that last claim a bit more. So far, I've just shown that we have a significant loss of labor and hidden costs in the recycling infrastructure. How do I go from there to claiming that we can have an environmentally sound solution. It's worth noting here that wasting peoples' time has an environmental cost to it. You need more people to do the same thing, and all of those people generate pollution. So just ignoring the costs of recycling infrastructure, we still are losing the labor of something like two people per thousand just from the "not much effort" of sorting garbage. That means a bit more pollution. Similarly, just wasting money has an environmental cost to it for similar reasons. To do the same work, you need to spend more and that means a greater diversion of resources in order to do so. That in turn means greater environmental harm.

These are hidden opportunity costs. We don't see how much more efficient and less polluting society could be, but we do see the savings in landfill space. From a municipality's point of view, that's all that matters. Landfills are unpopular. Recycling programs despite their costs are popular.

Some here are old enough to remember getting paid by the pound for aluminum cans. But, now I find myself paying for the service of recycling my recyclables. Recyclable materials have economic value, do they not? And, I paid for them when I bought the original products that utilized them, did they not? And he who receives the recycled material from me will extract economic value from them, will he not? That seems like a case study of win-win&win economics&environmentalism.

What a great solution, and as always, fixing the wrong problem just because we have a technology to do it. We penalize people for having more than a certain fraction of recyclables in the trash, but do nothing about how much absolute amount of trash there is.

Every kind of recycling incentive program we have is a bandaid to what is really needed -- the prices of things that reflect their true cost to society.

IMHO it would be far more efficient to take care of the separation at the plant rather than at the house. There is a lot of waste that goes into:

1) Cleaning2) Separating into bins3) Separate trash routes to pick it up4) storage and special handling of non-valuable recycling materials

I went on a tour of a high tech landfill once, they basically stored the non-valuable materials (e.g. glass, plastics) and when the bins were full, it went in the landfill.

There is no way they earn $26/ton for recyclables, unless they are getting it via grants, tax breaks, etc.. and other neat financial tricks to make you think they make money, when in actuality it is the tax base subsidizing the cost of the financial waste.

If the cost of the process of gathering and recycling can't be self sustainable, you are lighting a stack of your own money on fire when you do recycle it.

So, naysayers, instead of just telling me i'm wrong, show me the energy balance equation that proves me wrong. Because shredding and compactingtrash has been and appears to still be the most efficient waste management solution.

So Cleveland residents have to pay for trash collection in their water/sewage/etc bills every month, then, if they don't separate the items the trash collection company can get paid for instead of having to pay to dispose of, the residents get fined?
Why doesn't the trash company just pay people to pull the recyclables out of the trash back at the base?

So what's stopping a person from just putting a glass jar or two into the near-empty recycling bin and putting it on the curb every week just so the city guys don't come inspecting his trash? Will there be a minimum quota to be respected? What if you don't generate ENOUGH recyclable trash, will you be considered a non-litterbug and fined for not respecting the consumerism laws?

When it becomes naturally profitable to recycle people will do so themselves. Right now I don't throw away aluminum, stainless steel, brass, copper, lead, steel, some types of glass and several plastics plus newspapers. I use the glass, plastic and newspapers myself. I've found two places that will compete for the stainless, copper, lead and brass which I happen to come across and make my collection and transport costs worthwhile. The steel and aluminum go to another salvager which is reasonably close and pays well. I do this for my own benefit and will keep doing it regardless of the states insistence I line their pockets.

The rules in TFS wouldn't affect you: they'd notice you don't put out the bins for those goods, inspect your regular trash can, find no recyclable goods, and so can't fine you for throwing them in with the rest of the trash.

This is pretty much the standard way cities run these things. You did forget to mention that the "court costs" to fight the $100 fine will probably be $150-$200. For most "administrative" crimes it is more expensive to be innocent than guilty. Of course you have to prove your innocence as well. Good luck with that.

These trashcans only tell if they have been rolled out to the curb, not the contents.

However, since you mentioned it, the area where I live does sort through all of the trash at the landfill and separates out recyclables there. They don't have "technology" to do it but actual people. They dump all of the trash on a big conveyor belt and people pick out recyclables. I don't know how this compares in cost, recovery percent, etc. but they have been doing it for years.

Because government prefers to pass the onus on to citizens rather than take responsibility. Besides, they already have too much to do. Clearly citizens' time is less valuable than those who get paid to sort garbage.

Government isn't passing the onus onto you, they are trying to prevent you from passing the onus onto everyone else, and at a much higher cost, by mixing.

Well, if you're going to take it a step backwards (perfectly logical, it makes sense), then why not go even further and say the onus of sorting this stuff is being passed on to us by the corporations that sell everything with an excessive amount of packaging?

I know I'm not the only one that despises the hard plastic packages used for many small products. Someone here at work decided that we needed to buy a bunch of flash drives, and proceeded to not only waste money buying them from Best Buy at an absurd m

The city stepped up enforcement of ordinances governing trash collection last year by issuing 2,900 tickets, nearly five times more tickets than in 2008. Those infractions include citations for people who put out their trash too early or fail to bring in their garbage cans from the curb in a timely manner.The Division of Waste Collection is on track to meet its goal of issuing 4,000 citations this year, Owens said.

In England it is quite rare (but not unusual) to see little collections of black refuse bags by the roadside in residential areas. Each bag has a small white ticket affixed to it, notifying the owner that their rubbish won't be collected unless it fits completely within the approved bin on the right day, which is once every two weeks. If the approved bin is overflowing, if its lid will not close, then the bags will be pulled out of it and left behind, each with a ticket attached. Sometimes they will remain there for weeks. Ironically, this is done "to help the environment". It certainly helps the local rat population; other parts of the environment may not be so lucky. The usual response is to put your rubbish in other people's bins, minus identifying documents, so they will have to deal with the mess that's left outside their houses when the city doesn't collect it (I don't do this, but it has happened to me a few times).

Oh, get over your entitlement mentality already. You use the waste disposal service, you play by their rules. Don't like it? Buy your own damn landfill. It's not your God-given right to fill ours' up with recyclables.

Out in the country, you can opt for alternative trash collection. You can pay one of any number of companies to pick up your trash or you can take it to the dump yourself. When you live in the city, you have no choice.

I don't know about the GP, but where I live some of the cities mandate that all homeowners buy garbage pickup service from a single private company (if there is more than one contracted, they have "territories"). If you do not buy garbage service from this company, you get fined.

In the case of my particular city, you can haul your own garbage, but the city requires that the garbage company report anyone whose garbage service is discontinued. If you are on that list, your property is subject to inspection for compliance by the public works office.

This garbage company only picks up recyclables once every two weeks, which is not often enough given the amount of recyclables I have. So, I put overflow recyclables into the trash can that is emptied weekly once my recycle bin is full. I'd rather have them recycled. Further, according to the city ordinances it is illegal to possess garbage on your property for more than 7 days. My recyclable waste is "garbage"... so the city's contracted service doesn't even allow me to meet the letter of the law.

I see other posts mentioning how waste companies break (or nearly break) even or even make a profit selling the recyclables. Why the hell don't they pick up weekly, then?